He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.
M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense was simply too massive a cultural phenomenon for other 1990s movies with shocking twists to stand out. Not that they have been completely overlooked or forgotten, but they’re always overshadowed by Shyamalan’s movie in every conversation about plot twists. The Usual Suspects, directed by the disgraced Bryan Singer and written by Christopher McQuarrie, was praised for reasons beyond its climax. The movie grossed more than ten times its reported $6 million budget, and earned McQuarrie an Oscar for his tightly plotted script. The Sixth Sense would be released four years later. It grossed ten times as much as The Usual Suspects.
However, another movie with a shocking third-act twist was released between these two movies, in the year 1996. The legal thriller featured Richard Gere as a well-meaning lawyer who agrees to defend an altar boy accused of murdering a priest. The film served as a grand launchpad for Edward Norton, who received an Oscar nomination for his supporting performance. Directed by** Gregory Hoblit**, the legal thriller also featured Laura Linney, Alfre Woodard, Frances McDormand, and Andre Braugher.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
We’re talking, of course, about Primal Fear. The film was a box-office hit, grossing more than $100 million worldwide against a reported budget of $30 million. It received mostly positive reviews and now holds a 77% critics’ score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “Primal Fear is a straightforward yet entertaining thriller elevated by a crackerjack performance from Edward Norton.” The film’s audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, however, is sitting at a higher 89%. This is one of the many reasons for its continued success at home. However, Primal Fear certainly falls into the less-than-ideal category of movies that link mental illness to criminal behavior. Incidentally, Shyamalan went on to draw flak for making a similar connection in his 2016 movie Split. Hoblit, on the other hand, went on to direct another legal thriller, Fracture, starring Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins. Primal Fear is currently streaming on Peacock in the United States, but it’ll only be available on the platform until May 1. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
](/tag/thriller/)
An altar boy is accused of murdering a priest, and the truth is buried several layers deep.